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This work is the first comprehensive description of Sumerian constructions involving a copula. Using around 400 fully glossed examples, it gives a thorough analysis of all uses of the copula, which is one of the least understood and most frequently misinterpreted and consequently mistranslated morphemes in Sumerian. It starts with a concise introduction into the grammatical structure of Sumerian, followed by a study that is accessible to both linguists and sumerologists, as it applies the terminology of modern descriptive linguistics. It provides the oldest known and documented example of the path of grammaticalization that leads from a copula to a focus marker. It gives the description of Sumerian copular paratactic relative clauses, which make use of an otherwise only scarcely attested relativization strategy. At the end of the book, the reader will have a clear picture about the morphological and syntactic devices used to mark identificational, polarity and sentence focus in Sumerian, one of the oldest documented languages in the world.

This paper describes work on the morphological and syntactic annotation of Sumerian cuneiform as a model for low resource languages in general. Cuneiform texts are invaluable sources for the study of history, languages, economy, and cultures of Ancient Mesopotamia and its surrounding regions. Assyriology, the discipline dedicated to their study, has vast research potential, but lacks the modern means for computational processing and analysis. Our project, Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages, aims to fill this gap by bringing together corpus data, lexical data, linguistic annotations and object metadata. The project’s main goal is to build a pipeline for machine translation and annotation of Sumerian Ur III administrative texts. The rich and structured data is then to be made accessible in the form of (Linguistic) Linked Open Data (LLOD), which should open them to a larger research community. Our contribution is two-fold: in terms of language technology, our work represents the first attempt to develop an integrative infrastructure for the annotation of morphology and syntax on the basis of RDF technologies and LLOD resources. With respect to Assyriology, we work towards producing the first syntactically annotated corpus of Sumerian.

Türkçede ad tümceleri oluşturmak için kişi bildiren bazı ekler kullanılmaktadır. Bu eklere Türkçede, isim fiil ekleri, ek eylem, cevher fiili gibi adlar verilmektedir. Ek eylemin üçüncü kişisi için kullanılan eke ise bildirme eki denmektedir. Bu yapılara oldukça benzeyen bir yapıya, eklemeli dil yapısı ile bildiǧimiz Sümercede de rastlamaktayız. Sümerce ile Türkçe arasında daha önce bazı sözcük denklikleri araştırılmıştır. Yazıyı icat etmesiyle bir anlamda tarihin başlamasına vesile olmuş bir toplumun dili olan Sümercede me 'olmak' eylemi ad tümcesi oluşturmak için ekleşerek, kişi belirtir duruma gelmiş ve ek eylem olarak kullanılmıştır. Çalışmada iki farklı dilde ek eylem kullanımı ile ilgili örnekler tespit edilerek incelenmiştir. İki dilde de anlamsal benzerliklerin yanında yapısal benzerlikler olduǧu görülmüştür. Sümerce ve Türkçe'nin karşılaştırıldıǧı çalışmalar daha önce de yapılmıştır. Ancak bu çalışmalar sözcük denkliǧi çerçevesinde kalmışlardır. İki dilin yapısal işleyişi ile ilgili bu tür çalışmalar, dillerin birbirleriyle baǧlantılı olup olmadıkları konusunda verilebilecek yargıların doǧruluǧunu artırmaya yardımcı olacaktır.

The present dissertation investigates the root zu \"to know\" in the Sumerian texts of early Mesopotamia, ca. 2800-1600 B.C., with the aim of identifying its grammatical, syntactic and semantic characteristics. The root is treated across the Sumerian sources, but ultimately considered within the bilingual (Sumerian-Akkadian) situation of southern Mesopotamia. The adjectival and nominal forms of the root are also discussed, as well as their Akkadian counterparts. The analysis of the lexemes over a period stretching from ca. 2600-1600 BC offers interesting results in several categories (grammatical, literary, semantic), and contributes to discussions of the epistemological and practical implications associated with the concept of \"knowing\" in the Mesopotamian texts. While research into systems and categories of knowledge has been carried out in the field, no systematic lexical discussion of the verbal root meaning \"to know\" exists. This dissertation seeks to fill that lacuna. The methods employed in the dissertation lie within the well-established principles of philological and lexicographical investigation. Chapter 1 introduces the subject and reviews previous studies. Chapter 2 treats the Sumerian root zu, elucidating its formal and literary (idiomatic) characteristics. Appendices A and B document the corpus of examples consulted. Chapter 3 then discusses the derived adjectives from the root zu, likewise noting formal and literary (idiomatic) characteristics. Appendices C, D, E and F document their respective examples. Chapter 4 turns to the Akkadian root idû \"to know\" in bilingual and monolingual texts, in order to investigate (idiomatic) Semitic influence. It further takes up the Akkadian adjectives corresponding to those in Sumerian discussed in the third chapter. Chapter 5 enumerates personal names in Sumerian and Akkadian that employ the root \"to know.\" A concluding chapter sums up the evidence for the individual roots and lexemes and discusses their evolution, usage and correspondence within the scribal and linguistic settings of the different textual corpora and their historical period.

Here I investigate the model of Sumerian grammatical structure as it was created and understood by Old Babylonian scribes. [...]this endeavor may be compared to the investigations reported by Bellugi and Brown (1971), which deal with the peculiar grammars underlying the utterances of children at different stages of language acquisition, and with the children's implied formalization of language structure. Since I do not want to enter into a discussion of the meaning of the Akkadian terms maru and hamtu, I will generally use the notions of present and preterite tense, which at least have an established meaning in the Akkadian language, and thereby permit a classification of Sumerian forms according to their Akkadian counterparts. [...]when there is a definite personal pronoun (he, I, you) before the base, these bí-prefix forms in Akkadian are interpreted as ordinary transitive constructions \"he/I/you placed him/it\" with an invisible 3d-person direct object in suffix position. [...]OBGT IX conspicuously groups the paragraphs into pairs, each pair consisting of a non-causative and the corresponding causative paragraph, but only the Ni-section arranges those pairs in a systematic fashion.

Furthermore, in these later Semitic languages such as Aramaic or Biblical Hebrew, the only clear example of a definiteness effect is the restriction on the occurrence of the definite article on any noun that is in the construct state. [...]in (5) the noun in construct, bet \"house\" which is also the head of the genitive construction cannot bear the definite article *han- and the definiteness of the entire phrase is determined by the presence (or absence) of the article on the noun that follows and is not in construct, hammelek, \"the king.\" (Williamson 1987: 175) In terms of meaning, the strong quantifers are capable of picking a particular referent out of some larger set of possible referents, whereas the weak quantifiers are not. [...]most firemen\" necessarily refers to some but not all of the contextually salient set of firemen, but the weak quantifiers in (14) refer to some cardinal number of firemen or to the firemen who are available in a particular context. If the construct state codes weak quantification at some point in the history of Akkadian morphosyntax as detailed above, then it would make a certain amount of sense for strong quantifiers to be in complementary distribution with the construct state as well. Since most of the examples in the CAD of kalu in the construct state-where it is actually functioning as a strong quantifier-derive from first millennium sources and the first millennium also witnesses the development of the definite article in the languages that surrounded and infiltrated previously Akkadianspeaking regions, a certain amount of contamination from the quantificational systems of other Semitic languages such as Aramaic would not be surprising in the later texts. Where the prior noun phrase is a non-specific IHRC in Old Babylonian, a following noun phrase that refers to it must, likewise, be a non-specific IHRC as exemplified in (21) and (22), repeated below as (35) and (36). [...]as noted above, the use of an IHRC in the form of an Old Babylonian construct relative, necessitates the use of another IHRC in the second half of (36) to \"refer\" or perhaps better to \"equate\" the newly rebuilt house that is required of the negligent builder to the flawed house that had previously collapsed.

More than this, the binarism represented by the contrast of the two terms transcends the question of alternative media or modes of communication. [Walter Ong]'s arguments hinge on the cultural differences that arise from, and are symbolized by, the two communicative orders. For this reason, it is useful to sketch the terminological history of orality and literacy as a binary complex. This has indeed partly been done by Ong himself, who admits his indebtedness principally to Eric Havelock, Milman Parry, and Albert Lord (Presence 17-110; Interfaces 92-120 and 272-302; Orality and Literacy 6-30). According to him, Parry's philological inquiries revolutionized Homeric studies and resolved, once for all, the age-old Homeric question. For Parry found that \"the distinctive feature of Homeric poetry is due to the economy enforced on it by oral methods of composition\" (Ong, Orality and Literacy 21). Metrical exigencies and the constraints of human memory compelled the oral poet to take recourse to formulae, standardized themes, epithetic expressions, stock or \"heavy\" characters, and a copious and repetitive style. These findings by Parry were later confirmed and extended by Lord's study of contemporary Balkan epic poets in his well-known The Singer of Tales (1960). But it is to Havelock that Ong owes his elaboration of the consequences of the acquisition of literacy by the oral poet and an oral culture. In a more recent essay, Havelock, while acknowledging the primacy and necessity of oral language, restated the revolutionary impact of literacy on Greek society and Western civilization -- much the same point he had made in Preface to Plato (1963), Origins of Western Literacy (1976), and The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (1982). The Greek alphabet, he argues, was unique and infinitely superior to earlier Egyptian, Sumerian, and Phoenician writing systems because it \"provided an exhaustive table of atomic elements of acoustic sound that by diverse combinations could represent the molecules, so to speak, of linguistic speech\" (\"OralLiterate Equation\" 25). The importance of its introduction into Greek society lies in its enhanced storage and retrieval capacity -- a function earlier served primitively by oral poetic rhythm. Another consequence was the replacement of the narrative, activist, agent-oriented syntax of Homeric poetry, with a \"reflective syntax of definition, description, and analysis,\" which, according to Havelock, is typified by Platonic prose (\"Oral-Literate Equation\" 25). This was not a mere stylistic shift. On the contrary, it embodied a change in the psychological preconditions of the act and process of communication. In other words, it resulted in alterations in the organization and operation of the human consciousness. Therefore, it is not surprising that Havelock attributes to this shift the advances of Western knowledge and civilization. As he explicitly states, \"Without modern literacy, which means Greek literacy, we would not have science, philosophy, written law or literature, nor the automobile or the airplane\" (\"OralLiterate Equation\" 24). [Deborah Tannen]'s basic thesis is that the oral-literate paradigm, re-echoing as it does these other paradigms, has helped her in clarifying and categorizing contrasting discourse strategies from various situations including conversations, narratives, aesthetic responses, and so on. She discusses three examples from her research involving respectively Greek and American subjects, Americans and Greeks/American-Greeks, New York Jews and non-New Yorkers/non-Jews (\"Oral/Literate Continuum\" 4-13). Her conclusion is that the Greeks, Greek-Americans and New York Jews used discourse strategies that were \"inherently oral\" even though these subjects were highly literate people. These strategies include a tendency to formulaicness of language, personal/emotive involvement and internal evaluation. The American subjects, on the other hand, adopted writing strategies such as external evaluation, decontextualization, and novelty of expression. Although she admits that these strategies have become \"culturally conventionalized,\" she nevertheless insists with surprising agility that the distinction is not along ethnic or cultural lines, proclaiming in one telling sentence: \"It will not do to label some people as oral and others as literate\" (13-14).

Gadotti reviews A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts by John L. Hays.